The Ultimate Guide to Converting Websites/HTML to PDF: Everything You Need to Know

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the best methods and tools available for converting websites/HTML to PDF format, including online converters and web frameworks. Whether you need to save important web pages for offline viewing or share them with others, we’ll show you how to get the job done quickly and easily. We’ll also touch on advanced features such as customization options, and security considerations. Whether you’re a tech-savvy user or a complete beginner, this guide will provide you with all the information you need to make the most of website to PDF conversion.

First we’ll discuss Online converters, these are the most easy and convenient method available. We just have to provide the URL of the webpage we want to convert and these websites will take care of all the processing and provide you the PDF. Few of the most popular Online converters are web2pdf, web2pdfconvert.

However these Online converters comes handy only with the basic sites and there are few tradeoffs like f you want to convert some webpage with is authenticated then also this method will be of no use, if you’re working on your own HTML page and you want to customize something in the PDF then it wont be possible in this method and there is always secure concern when you’re using third party websites for your projects.

Second method is for programmers who want there HTML pages converted to PDF. I’ll be discussing the solution for JavaScript Developers, they can handle this situation by client side itself be it Angular, React, Vue you just have to install NPM libraries like HTML2pdf.js, JsPDF, HTML2Canvas, pdfMake etc.

All these libraries use different approaches for conversion. JsPDF is the most popular libraries for PDF conversion, you can add text, images, vector graphics, and HTML elements to your PDF documents it is a versatile and powerful tool for generating dynamic PDFs on the client side.

var doc = new jsPDF();
    var elementHTML = document.querySelector("#element-to-capture").innerHTML;
    var specialElementHandlers = {
      "#element-to-capture": function(element, renderer) {
        return true;
      }
    };

    doc.text("This is some sample text.", 10, 10);
    doc.addImage(document.querySelector("#element-to-capture img"), "JPEG", 15, 40, 80, 80);
    doc.fromHTML(elementHTML, 15, 120, {
      "width": 170,
      "elementHandlers": specialElementHandlers
    });
    doc.save("captured-element.pdf");

JsPDF is useful if you are creating the PDF from scratch, but if you already have a page which you want to convert you’ll have to use libraries like HTML2Canvas. This library basically screenshots the webpage and then with the help of JsPDF you can add those screenshots to the PDF file.

html2canvas(document.querySelector("#element-to-capture"), {
      onrendered: function(canvas) {
        var imgData = canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg", 1.0);
        var doc = new jsPDF("landscape");
        doc.addImage(imgData, "JPEG", 10, 10, 280, 150);
        doc.save("captured-element.pdf");

And if you know you don’t have to edit the PDF much you can use html2pdf.js which much more easy to use it uses JsPDF and HTML2Canvas both and provide you PDF.

var element = document.getElementById('element-to-print');
var opt = {
  margin:       1,
  filename:     'myfile.pdf',
  image:        { type: 'jpeg', quality: 0.98 },
  html2canvas:  { scale: 2 },
  jsPDF:        { unit: 'in', format: 'letter', orientation: 'portrait' }
};
 
// New Promise-based usage:
html2pdf().from(element).set(opt).save();

But it also comes off with some tradeoffs, as these methods uses screenshots of the page you cannot copy or search the text content. So you’ll have to choose as per your requirement.

The last method is using a node library named Puppeteer. This library is basically a web crawler which uses headless chrome. To use Puppeteer you’ll have to provide the URL of the webpage and this will open the the site using headless chrome and convert the page using Chrome’s save as pdf functionality. You can explore this functionality by pressing CTRL+P and then choosing “Save as PDF” option in Chrome. As it using a chrome instance it provides a wide variety of features like screenshotting, handling dynamic content, login and authentication, saving credentials using cookies and many more. This makes sure everything you provide is safe and secure and PDF provided will be searchable. In this method the PDF will customizable up to some extent like you can add HTML as custom headers footers. Puppeteer is currently available only in Node and we also have Puppeteer Sharp which is a .NET port of the official Node.JS Puppeteer API.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function generatePDF() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://www.example.com');
  await page.emulateMedia('screen');

  const buffer = await page.pdf({
    format: 'A4',
    printBackground: true,
    margin: {
      top: '1cm',
      bottom: '1cm',
      left: '1cm',
      right: '1cm'
    }
  });

  await browser.close();
  return buffer;
}

generatePDF().then(function(pdf) {
  fs.writeFileSync('example.pdf', pdf);
});

When choosing a tool for converting HTML into PDF, it’s important to consider the complexity of the HTML content, the desired format and layout of the PDF, and the level of automation and customization required. html2canvas and jsPDF are suitable for simple HTML content, while Puppeteer offers more advanced features and the ability to handle dynamic content and authentication.

In this article, we’ve shown how to use html2canvas and jsPDF to convert HTML into PDF, and demonstrated the key features of Puppeteer for generating PDFs from websites. By using these tools, you can easily convert HTML into PDF and automate the process of document generation.